CIGARETTE PAPERS.

Southland Times, Issue 21580, 18 December 1931, Page 8

CIGARETTE PAPERS.

AN ODD INSTRUMENT. One of the little tricks of the diurnal writers, when stuck for a subject is to open the dictionary at random, and blindly pick out a word. To-day I tried this and was unfortunate: my unfettered finger plunged heartlessly, maliciously on “kanoon,” which was graciously interpreted as a “kind of harp with fifty or sixty strings; from the Arabic qanun.” A harp of fifty or sixty strings may seem rather generous, but doubtless this Arabic instrument preceded the pedalled harp of Europe’s music, with its forty-seven or forty-eight strings. Our large triangular harp, which ladies favoured in the Victorian era because it was so graceful, came to us from the Greeks, but the Arabic instrument was probably older. I have moving in my mind as I write the recollection of the Chinese kin, which was a harp of many strings played with a plectrum and used to supply very high pitched' notes. The Egyptians, too, had a harp they called the kinnor, and so one is tempted to group the three, and provide the kanoon with a decent ancestry dating back to the early Chinese orchestras. If one can justly link the kanoon with the kin —it is also an elderly relative of our “canon”—it can carry its ancestry even further back because only two of our instruments are older: the drum and the pipe. After the human voice, the earliest recorded instrument is the drum used to supply the rhythmic beat to which all nations still respond. Then came the hollowed reed, the first instrument capable of varied tones, and the harp, first plucked by the fingers, and later played with a plectrum. It is not difficult to find the origin of the drum. A chance blow on a hollow tree would give the inspiration and breezes blowing through the reeds were enough to suggest the pipe, the forerunner of all wind instruments, but Nature did not propose the harp. Man the hunter, the warrior, devised the bow and arrow to lengthen his arm and make good his lack of speed, and he must have noticed the sound as he released the bowstring. Later some more ambitious member of the tribe discovered that by using strings of different length or at different tensions he could produce variations in tone, and there he laid the foundations of the violin. The drum and the harp owed their origins to instruments of war, but the pipes were the offspring of peace, and, with one notable exception, we associated them particularly with pastoral music. The kanoon came from war, a reminder that the debts of warfare are not all on one side. —CRITICUS.